…and get the latest The Beautiful Kantine Band album!
Reminds me of our last “we definitely need a Vespa Primavera for summer months” office chat this week. Those Liverpool-greyish dressed Burgenländers came up with some excellent sixties tunes – 8 out of 10 Vespas if you ask me!
[youtube ClD_zhJlKw8]
The advantage of centralized networks is that if the central server is broken and reports a BIG FAT ERROR nobody can login and go online.
Great! Luckily there is still a BIG FAT ETHERNET cable in the drawer…
Who says social networks are limited to human beings only?
Thanks to some ingenious Metalab members it’s now possible to add the Metalab door to your friends on twitter and follow its exciting messages. Possibly the first serious twitter application out there.
NeoOffice 2.1 is out, their servers are melting and no torrent file is in sight – unfortunately I wasn’t able to create a NeoOffice torrent file by myself, my torrent client only gave me error messages.
Here is a NeoOffice download mirror that still works. Be quick!
My first impression 5 minutes after installation:
At yesterday’s Web Monday, hosted by Metalab, I attended an interesting presentation about microformats (given by Eric). Among other things the open microformat standard includes a “geo” element to define geographic locations.
As Alex yesterday mentioned, the documents, as well as the documents referred to, lack of declaring a reference system. It’s quite obvious, and has been already discussed in the geo microformat BOF, that the coordinates enclosed by the “geo” tag are based on WGS84.
How come that WGS84 didn’t make it into the document then? I think an “open standard specification” must not allow any room for misinterpretations and therefore should include the declaration of the applied geographic reference system in some section.
…it works in Google Maps, so it seems to be right…
Ouch.
Why is defining a reference system important?
Once you leave Google Maps behind and try to visualize your geographic information in other mapping applications, such as national mapping services based on national reference systems others than WGS84 for instance, you should tell those applications about the framework you used to identify your locations. Otherwise you’ll run into troubles regarding the accuracy of your locations.
Austria is a small country but the national reference system includes 3 different prime meridians. In order to achieve satisfying mapping results you’ll always choose the closest meridian to your mapping area. Without the information which meridian was used for data collection for instance, you’ll end up having at least 3 options where your locations could be.
No serious web developer would ever write an HTML-document without a valid Document Type Declaration. It’s quite similar in geodesy with geographic data and reference systems. Would be great to see neogeographers fulfill minimum geodesy requirements. Geography is for some time around now and things like reference systems have turned out to be very useful.
Due to Flickr’s terms of services it’s not allowed to embed pictures hosted on Flickr on other websites without linking back to the corresponding Flickr photo page. People who are trying to keep traffic low on their own servers usually outsource images to services like photobucket. Unlike Flickr, photobucket basically allows embedding pictures on third party sites without immediately creating a backlink, but limits photo hosting up to a certain amount of storage and bandwith usage. Once users exceed their bandwith limit, a nice little photobucket message shows up instead of the original picture.
Well, that strategy doesn’t seem so bad at all. That way photobucket sneaks free ads into other popular portals like MySpace, Facebook, Blogs, etc. and even into some user profile pages of their main competitor Flickr.
I have the strange feeling that it’s going to be a hard day tomorrow. If at least weather would be nicer to spend the day outside.
The problem is that all my home entertainment is organized on my computer. If iPods count as computers too it’ll be a very silent day tomorrow. Even though my neighbors would probably appreciate that.
No rainy Saturday afternoon movie either, because without turning the computer on I can’t watch a DVD. At least the day shows how much I already depend on that device.
But there is still one thing I’m really concerned about: the morning news paper I need after getting out of bed. Either I have to leave the house without having a coffee and buy a real paper news paper somewhere downstairs or I’ll have my morning coffee without reading the news. Morning coffee together with morning news, which I usually read online, is some sort of holy morning habit in my life. This is going to be really though tomorrow in any case.
This is great news for simple location encoding formats: Google announced today native support for GeoRSS in the Google Maps API.
So to view a GeoRSS flavored feed in Google maps just type the URL into the Google Maps search field or add it as query parameter like this.
What’s next? Maybe GeoRSS feeds getting indexed for searches within Google Earth? Just imagine for a moment the amount of content you could access out of Google Earth…
Well, I didn’t jump on the Twitter bandwagon – the last days my feed reader was quite cluttered with blog posts starting with t and ending in witter – but the twittervision map mashup nicely demonstrates visualization of rapidly changing geotagged content.
As far as I can tell, after having a quick look at the Twitter API, the map solely relies on geocoding services. There is only a <location> element containing place names in the Twitter data stream, no GeoRSS or any other geotagging method has been applied yet.
Doing internet researches you mostly end up browsing sites which have absolutely nothing to do with your originally intended research topic. For example searching for some specific information about Serbia brings up that site (filed under: some people really do scare me) which leads you to this site and you end up searching meanings of surnames.
I found it rather curious that my surname was used as an expression for lumbermen and also for slim people. Curious because my grandfather actually was a lumberman and if you know me in person you would probably describe me as slim.
After looking up my name I couldn’t resist and search for names of politicians, especially from the right wing party who constantly claim their German identity. Turns out the surname of their head, Mr Strache, is the short form for the Slavic name Strachomir, a name widespread in Bohemia and parts of Poland. As result of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slavic names are very common in the Vienna region. Anyhow, it made me smile that even our German National fellows have family links back to Bohemia or Poland. Still more interesting is the meaning of Strache: apparently the name roots in the words for fear and scariness. Observing the latest activities of the right wing party, regarding the initiative SOS Occident, the meaning of the name becomes even clearer.
